`In My Father`s House` Delivers A Harrowing Tale Of Child Abuse

May 28, 1989|By Sid Smith, Entertainment writer.

Last week`s highly publicized television film, ``I Know My First Name Is Steven,`` cast a frank, compelling look at a sexually abused child while in captivity, for seven years, of the stranger who kidnaped him.

Apple Tree Theatre in Highland Park, meanwhile, is currently presenting perhaps an even darker, more deadly side of the picture. Ross Lehman`s original play, ``In My Father`s House,`` produced in association with the Child Abuse Protection Services, is all about a similar abuse within the family. Headlines and a statewide police force sought, albeit in vain, to find the missing Steven of the television title.

But Lehman`s tale is about a more insidious, more easily hidden villainy, and, like most new plays, while needing lots of work, it`s a gripping, skillfully told drama that strikes an eminently respectable balance between the need to raise social hackles and the theatrical demand for a believable, artful story.

The onetime, now grownup victim, John (Ray Chapman), arrives home, many years after the abuse incidents, for his annual family visit, only to meet a surprise: his Uncle Leo (Tim Monsion), who is usually on vacation during John`s once-a-year returns. Leo has been living with the family since John was a child, after the boy`s parents were in a car crash killing his mother and crippling his father (Richard Burton Brown). This year, Leo decided to stay home for a telling reason-he`s about to take charge of an adolescent foster child (Christian Robinson), and John, unaware of either that plan or his uncle`s presence, stumbles in on the day the new family resident is about to arrive.

That sets off a chain of dramatics, confrontations, confessions, recriminations and revelations, beginning with John`s insistence that his Uncle Leo is unfit to take charge of a young boy. Gradually, we learn that Uncle Leo secretly molested John for years, that this act is the source of his alienation from his family and his total revulsion for his uncle. Meanwhile, John`s demands that his father do something to prevent the pattern from happening with the foster child carry prickly complications.

The father has been desperately dependent on his younger brother for years. If he demands Leo give up the boy, Leo may leave, rendering the crippled man helpless, a situation, he quickly reminds his son, that wouldn`t be so if John were around to do a son`s duty.

Lehman employs the device of a ``ghost,`` the fantasy presence of young John in his abused years, played by William Bubon, who follows the older John around and interacts with him in key scenes. The ploy is overused and sometimes intrusive-when the first revelations about abuse are spilling out, this young John bangs away at furniture and exhibits other temper tantrums in a way that detracts rather than promotes the action. But the motif has an effective final payoff.

The cast and Terry McCabe`s direction are additional pluses. While the players` explosiveness is sometimes a bit much, their carefully wrought, impassioned and, in Brown`s wonderful performance, highly funny portrayals are partly what move the story.

``In My Father`s House`` is, in the end, a melodrama with a message, but it`s a timely, bold and remarkably well-handled issue.

This is about a family with a skeleton that cries out for honesty, mercy and understanding, and Lehman delivers.

``IN MY FATHER`S HOUSE``

A drama by Ross Lehman, directed by Terrry McCabe; set by Janice Barnett, costumes by Brigid Brown and lighting by David Gipson. Opened May 11 and playing at the Apple Tree Theatre, Highland Park, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 6 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 4. Length of performance, 2 hours. Tickets are $13 to $16. Phone 432-4335.